We touched on introns and exons in my bio class, but unfortunately we didn't really talk about why Eukaryotes have introns. It would seem they would have to have some purpose since prokaryotes do not ...

I am currently hearing a lecture about human machine interaction. The lecturer is not a biologist (neither am I, we are both computer scientists), but he makes some statements about biology which I ...

I was recently working on getting a statistical model of a DNA sequence. To do this I found that understanding evolution quantitatively seems to be quite important. I would really appreciate any book ...

The wikipedia definition of Absolute fitness is "the ratio between the number of individuals with that genotype after selection to those before selection. It is calculated for a single generation and ...

Chicks (baby of chickens) and ducklings seem to have fine hairs, at least something look like hairs to me. Most mammals have hairs, but reptiles, fish, or other animal groups do not have hairs as far ...

I was listening to this story by Radiolab where they mention that HeLa cells contaminate other cell cultures and can float on specks of dust. Wikipedia says that HeLa cells are robust.
My question is ...

This days I read some debates on evolution. That made me more interested to read something reliable on topic - I mean books.
I'm christian - although I think it doesn't matter on that topic - and I ...

Here is wikipedia page containing a list of plants used in herbal medicine. One might first want to argue that many of them actually do not have any medicinal/beneficial effect on heatlth. I think we ...

It seems that our technology heavily favors wheels for the locomotion of machines over land, but evolution came up with legs instead.
The following assumptions might be wrong, I'm merely speculating, ...

In his book "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins says that retaliator emerges as an evolutionary stable strategy. But I think dove is also a kind of retaliator and so if dove increases, the hawks and ...

I understand that many curated trees of life already exist (eg http://tolweb.org/tree/) but is there any website that allows one to input a list of organisms, and then produce the current best guess ...

Iodine and related biological iodine-carrying hormones are phylogenetically very old, at least according to Wikipedia. Humans use iodine as a metabolic indicator, as do axolotls and apparently most ...

A common saying is that women are generally more attracted towards men who are already in a relationship, and this phenomena does seem to have its own place in popular culture that is not matched by a ...

Watch any wilderness special for more than a few minutes, and you'll notice a familiar pattern: when a predator catches the scent of blood on the wind, the hunt is on. Wounded animals make the best ...

The biological purpose of an organism is to reproduce and as soon as reproductive age is passed, aging kicks in and eventually leads to death. (This is what I learned from a gerontologist.) But then, ...

I'd be tempted to call nipples in men vestigial, but that suggests they have no modern function. They do have a function, of course, but only in women. So why do men (and all male mammals) have them?
...

I just finished reading the Wikipedia page about dinosaurs, and I very much enjoyed it. I knew that much of what I learned in the 80's as a child is (and was) incorrect, and now that I am a parent, I ...

The majority of animals have two genders, and both are needed in reproduction. It seems like it would be more advantageous for creatures to be hermaphrodites, since they could mate with any member of ...

I know that ammonia is toxic for the body since it disturbs enzymes of mitochondria.
I want to know that why the ammonotelic animals don't get affected by it?
I mean that even if there is plenty of ...

Background
General concept
According to Cochran and Harpending (2013), mothers transmits on average a number $x$ of new mutations to their offspring. This number $x$ is independent of the age of the ...

Going back the genealogical lineage from present humans to the beginning of life, what was the biggest - in terms of body size or mass - animal in this sequence?
More generally, what would a time vs. ...

Are there any statistics available on how much energy organisms use for each biological functions (i.e. something similar to the line of "Bacteria spend X% of energy on information processing, Y% for ...

TLDR? Just read the bold bits!
I started with Darwin's Origin of Species, and then read Dawkins's first three books The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and The Blind watchmaker (I just started ...

There are obviously good reasons that explain why you cannot tickle yourself (see e.g. here). This got me thinking why it is possible to masturbate...
Wouldn't it make more sense to not being able to ...

Is there any mathematical model to predict the behaviour and long-term consequence of counter-acting selection at different time scale?
For example, let's consider the bi-allelic gene A, with alleles ...